In a column in Monday's New York Times,  David Carr became the latest media watcher to suggest that newspapers start charging for their content online. After citing some fallen papers (Rocky Mountain News) and some that are teetering on the edge (San Francisco Chronicle), Carr said some other ostriches could still save their necks by making people pay.
 

"The Web has become the primary delivery mechanism for quality newsrooms across the country," he wrote, "and consumers will have to participate in financing the newsgathering process if it is to continue." In any other business this might seem like common sense but as anyone who recalls the evolution of newspapers online can attest, the folks who insisted on charging for the news used to be considered the ostriches.
 
Like Walter Isaacson, whose Feb 5 story in Time, "How to Save Your Newspaper," Carr suggested to those hooked on freebies that the party is now over. And he doesn't just mean the individual consumers, of whom the young are the worst. (Every semester I ask kids in my New School journalism class how many read the paper and nearly every hand goes up; when I ask them how many pay for it you would think I was asking for volunteers for active duty in Afghanistan.) He means the "aggregators" and "framers," from theHuff Post to the Daily Beast, that are essentially playing on someone else's dime. They might squeal that they are driving traffic to the papers's sites when they quote them at length, but if that traffic is not yielding any profit, what good does it do the paper to provide reporting -- the costly, boots-on-the-ground, reporter-on-the-phone kind that most bloggers only know from movies -- to pundits if they can't keep paying the reporter?
 
Because that's what it comes down to. My wife emailed me today about a reporter who had contacted her from Arizona. He'd been laid off at his paper, another paper fighting extinction, and was now working in (wait for it) a prison. (One of our nation's last growth industries!) The difficult job of gathering news -- and not just gathering it but writing it and putting it in a context that you can understand, whether that context be our banking system or the Sahara Subcontinent -- should be met with more respect.
 
As far as the millions of readers who would refuse to pay for what they used to get free, well, maybe we'll end up with two-class society, those who are informed about the events of the world and those who only know what they see on South Park or hear on Rush. Come to think of it, we're already there.